Monday, June 30, 2008

Jewish Jew basher Antony Loewenstein has been put in his place on his own blog by a correspondent Sol Salbe over his parroting of a report from the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information which recently condemned "the detention of Palestinian Journalist Mohammad Omer Mughir by Israeli Occupation Forces. Muhammad was detained, assaulted and interrogated on June 27th upon his return to Gaza after receiving the 2008 Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism." - Reporting is a crime

Salbe points out that:

Does not it stuck you odd that Omer would have been attacked by the Israeli security forces upon his return to Gaza? There are no Israeli forces in Gaza and any incursion would have been such a mnajor violation of the ceasefire that even the Australian media would have reported it.

Omer was set upon at the Aleenby Bridge while crossing the Allenby Bridge into the West Bank from Jordan. With the Rafah crossing closed someone with a permit need to travel via the West Bank into Israel and from there in to Gaza. If bloggers would like to be treated as journalists then fact-checking of obviously impossible assertions is not an option but a necessity.

Like the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, the area's geography is not Loewenstein's strong point. In the first edition of his book, My Israel Question, he placed Israel's Gallilee region in Lebanon. This would have surely been a highpoint in his career as an author as it was for Louise Adler (also apparently Jewish) as a book publisher.

Thursday, June 26, 2008

Today's Melbourne Age carries a story from its new Jerusalem Bureau Chief Jason Koutsoukis about a deal between Israeli PM Ehud Olmert and Labour Party leader Ehud Barak that has effectively saved Olmert's political skin for the time being - Leadership deal saves Israeli PM.

Buried away at the very end of the article are these paragraphs:-

"Meanwhile, the fragile truce between Israel and Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip appeared to be in danger of collapsing after rockets were fired yesterday from Gaza into the Israeli township of Sderot, injuring two people.

Just days after the truce was agreed to, the rocket attacks were launched after Israeli soldiers killed two Islamic Jihad members in the West Bank. Islamic Jihad had previously said before signing the truce that it would respond to assassinations carried out by Israel in the West Bank.

Following the rocket attacks, Mr Barak, who is Defence Minister, ordered all crossings to the Gaza Strip closed, with only humanitarian supplies allowed through the Erez crossing in Gaza's north-east.

Hamas, the radical Islamic movement that controls Gaza, said it was doing everything possible to preserve the truce."

Strange that such news finds itself situated at the very end of the article. No mention of what the Islamic Jihad people were doing when when killed by the IDF or the fact that Islamic Jihad often carries out operations in conjunction with Hamas and that it wouldn't dare do so without Hamas' consent. Still one wonders whether Koutsoukis' predecessor would have even deigned to mention the rocket attacks on Israeli civilian targets at all.

One also wonders about the photograph accompanying this article about the Israeli political crisis. The picture is of a restaurant 'Buns and Guns', located in the security zone of Beirut. Lebanon isn't even mentioned or relevant to the article but someone at Fairfax doesn't mind associating Israeli leaders with this gruesome gun theme.

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Martin Peretz of The New Republic has written a great piece on recent peace efforts from Israel including negotiations with Syria and the truce with Hamas brokered by the Egyptians. Here are some excerpts from Peace Offensive:

In Middle Eastern wars, the United Nations is almost always hectoring Israel for being reluctant to seek peace. So it was a stunner when Terje Rød-Larsen--U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali's "special coordinator" in the occupied territories, Kofi Annan's "personal representative" to Yasir Arafat, Ban Ki-moon's "special representative" for overseeing the cease-fire agreement ending the second Lebanon war, and in his next posting "envoy to the personal representative of the special coordinator for planetary salvation"--lambasted Israel for its recent negotiations with Syria: "Israel has given Syria a huge gift, without thus far receiving anything in return."

It used to be that Israel would move the heavens to rescue its kidnapped soldiers. This is one reason for the daring of so many of its fighting men. In recent years there has been an increase in kidnapping as a battle tactic by both the Palestinians and Hezbollah. Frankly, the Arabs play cruel games with these people (and their relatives), not saying whether they are dead or alive, even those who were captured decades ago. Are Eldad Regev and Udi Goldwasser still in this world? Nasrallah will not say. Gilad Shalit, it is believed, is still alive. Why was he not released in exchange for the last return of Palestinian prisoners? Liat Collins had a story, "Between life and the dead," in the Jerusalem Post some weeks ago detailing this manipulation of sorrow and fear. Dog tags and body parts are transmitted but not accurate information or men who are still breathing. Make peace with these people? This might be the only instance you hear me utter this: I wholeheartedly agree with the U.N. hack.

What amazes me is that these people have so much support among our intellectuals and within our media. Peretz has nailed it as usual but the world doesn't care. So two years down the track, captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit remains a prisoner who has none of the rights accorded to most captives in his situation. Yet, Age cartoonist Petty has sympathy for the supposedly democratically elected Hamas that holds him.

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

The Melbourne Age yesterday published a vile excuse for a cartoon by one of its resident scribblers who goes by the very appropriate name of "Petty". It makes little sense but it's clearly a pro Hamas piece and is typical of the uninformed and ignorant rubbish that could only emanate from a newspaper edited by someone who once published an opinion piece that suggested Israel and the Mossad were behind the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington.

Hamas is in power by virtue of a democratic election in much the same way as Hitler and Mugabe were democratically elected but Petty would never dare to put together a comic little piece in support of the thuggery that has forced Zimbabwe opposition leader Morgan Tsvangarai out of Friday's Presidential poll, would he?

Quite apart from the historically incorrect and the odious nature of Petty's daubing, what makes the publication of his racist attack on the Jewish State and its people even more incrdible is its timing.

Now, in the early days of the truce between Israel and Hamas, when Israel is living up to the terms of its agreement and allowing in a promised 30 per cent increase of food and commercial goods into Gaza which it said it would do when the violence against its citizens stopped.

Now, when people of goodwill seek to bring about peace by negotiation in this troubled region.

Then again, his cartooning work leads one to to doubt whether Petty knows or understands the broader issues of the conflict and the difficulties involved in achieving a peaceful two state solution when you have a thug movement which advocates the destruction of one of those states and genocide against the Jews.

Thursday, June 19, 2008

The Australian Financial Review allowed this through onto its letters page:-

Palestinians miss out

The Palestinians were entitled to reject the United Nations partition plan. By 1947, despite massive Jewish immigration from Europe Jews formed only 33% of the population. However, the UN Partition plan gave the Jews 54% of Palestine, even though they owned only 6 % of Palestine’s land.

So the Palestinians were asked to give up more then half of their country for the benefit of a minority of recently arrived European settlers. Not surprisingly, they refused.

These European Jewish settlers had no intention of restricting their state to the borders envisaged by the UN partition plan. In November 1947 they attacked the Arab state proposed under the UN, destroyed hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages, and expelled their inhabitants. Only the intervention of the Arab armies in May 1948 prevented a Jewish takeover of all of Palestine in 1948

Paul Dixon,Fraser,ACT

The flaw in Dixon's argument is that implication that because the Jews owned 6% of what remained Palestine in 1947 then the Arabs must have owned all of the remainder which is untrue - most of it was Crown Land and a large part of it was desert land. The big lie is that European Jews "attacked the Arab state proposed under the UN". This is a preposterous assertion that would make even the most bent of revisionist historians blush bright red. It is the sort of lie we can expect from unrepentant anti-Semites who have no qualms about distorting Jewish history for their own propaganda ends.

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Kudos to the Austrlian and its op ed writer, Canadian MP Irwin Cotler for this piece in support of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's principle stand on Iran's threats against Israel:

"THE enduring lesson of the Holocaust - and the genocides in the Balkans and Rwanda - is that they occurred not simply because of the machinery of death, but because of the state-sanctioned incitement to hatred.

It is this teaching of contempt - this demonising of the other - this is where it all begins.

As the Supreme Court of Canada put it, "The Holocaust did not begin in the gas chambers; it began with words." The court added - in words echoed by the International Criminal Tribunals for Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda - that these are "the catastrophic effects of racism", the chilling facts of history."

A stark contrast to the recent ranting and apologetics for the racist Iranian regime from Amin Saikal in the Fairfax media.

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Honest Reporting has an interesting item on an alleged eye witness report given by the BBC's Aleem Maqbool which differs markedly from those of other news agencies.

It seems that objectivity among many in the British news media has been flushed down the gurgler these days and this is particularly so inside the BBC which has had a great deal to do with this disturbing development in a country that has some dark traditions of anti-Jewish behaviour in its history.

Saturday, June 07, 2008

In the almost two years of its existence, the major beneficiary of the activities of the United Nations Human Rights Council has been Hamas - an Islamic movement whose stated aim is to destroy a member state of the United Nations and to commit genocide. That Hamas has sufficient support in the UN is a blight on the organisation that was established in the shadows of the Second World War and the atrocities committed between 1939 and 1945.

According to a Reuters Report, the "United States has quietly informed Western allies of its intention to walk away from the U.N. Human Rights Council."

The U.S. deserves congratulations for taking this honourable and ethical stand while those who remain on UNHRC are deserving of contempt.

Thursday, June 05, 2008

Today is the 41st Anniversary of the commencement of the Six Day Way and the 40th Anniversary of the assassination of Robert Kennedy at the hands of Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian. The following has been released by the Institute for Contemporary Affairs/Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs:

In April 1948, one month before Israel declared independence, Robert Kennedy, then 22, traveled to Palestine to report on the conflict for the Boston Post. His four dispatches from the scene were published in June 1948. The newspaper closed in 1956, and for decades the reports were virtually forgotten. The following are excerpts:

"Unfortunately for [the Jews, Jerusalem's water] reservoir is situated in the mountains and it and the whole pipeline are controlled by the Arabs. The British would not let them cut the water off until after May 15th but an Arab told me they would not even do it then. First they would poison it."

"The Arab responsible for the blowing up of the Jewish Agency on March 11, 1948, said that "after the explosion, upon reaching the British post which separated the Jewish section from a small neutral zone set up in the middle of Jerusalem, he was questioned by the British officers in charge. He quite freely admitted what he had done and was given immediate passage with the remark, 'Nice going.'"

"The Jews informed the British government that 600 Iraqi troops were going to cross into Palestine from Trans-Jordan by the Allenby Bridge on a certain date and requested the British to take appropriate action to prevent this passage. The troops crossed unmolested....I saw several thousand non-Palestinian Arab troops in Palestine, including many of the famed British-trained and equipped Arab legionnaires of King Abdullah [of Trans-Jordan]. There were also soldiers from Syria, Lebanon, Iraq."

"The Arabs in command believe that eventually victory must be theirs. It is against all law and nature that this Jewish state should exist. They...promise that if it does become a reality it will never have as neighbors anything but hostile countries, which will continue the fight militarily and economically until victory is achieved."

"The Jews on the other hand believe that in a few more years, if a Jewish state is formed, it will be the only stabilizing factor remaining in the Near and Middle East. The Arab world is made up of many disgruntled factions which would have been at each other's throats long ago if it had not been for the common war against Zionism."

"A flotilla of US navy ships off the coast of Burma are leaving after failing to get the junta's permission to unload aid supplies to "ease the suffering of hundreds of thousands" of cyclone survivors." - US ships sail away as Burma snubs cyclone aid.

In another part of the world, trucks carrying supplies of humanitarian aid for the people of Gaza and oil terminals from which much needed fuel is delivered to them, are under constant attack from Palestinian terrorist groups acting with the blessing of the Hamas junta.

The Burmese junta and the Hamas junta are reprehensible and are exercising collective punishment on the their own people and yet, throughout the world, there is a body of people who either cheer Hamas on and blame Israel for the crisis or refuse to even talk about it.

Clearly, those in power in Burma are disgusting and need to be overthrown for the sake of the Burmese people, but the stench of hypocrisy applies to those who turn their heads away and ignore the obsene behaviour of the Palestinian leadership in Gaza and in many instances, in the West Bank as well.

Sunday, June 01, 2008

This Jerusalem Post Editorial - Myth & Muhammad al-Dura - reminds us how the recent (and largely unreported) French Court of Appeals decision on the fraudulent al-Dura affair "calls much-needed attention to the ways in which world opinion is shaped by perceptions that are themselves shaped by a not infallible media and how such myths are "fervently seized by those who seek confirmation for their belief in Israeli culpability, that it is likely never to be erased from international consciousness."

"If the editors, photographers, cartoonists, reporters and analysts who shape the reports delivered into the conventional news channels were obliged to face critical analysis, had to justify their frequently agenda-driven spinning, had to give an accounting for their prejudicial distortions and lies, then most of the venom directed at Israel and Israelis wouldn't be there."

And it really is a case of frequent media spinning that is not confined to the single story of the Muhammed al-Dura video, filmed by Palestinian cameraman Talal Abu Rahma and aired by France 2 with its explosive but misleading commentary from Charles Enderlin who was nowhere near the scene but blamed the Israelis for the child's death. The cameraman's film (at least the 18 minutes out of 27 that the court ordered to be released) showed what the Jerusalem Post called "apparently staged scenes and faked ambulance runs". The international news media has been infested over the past decade by an industry of lies.

Danny Seaman describes how far reaching and damaging this industry has become for Israel and the Jewish people:

"Often we see reports about some kind of harm done to the Palestinians by Israel that immediately make headlines worldwide. In many cases, the charges turn out to be false, yet the damage to Israel is already done. This stems from the fact that foreign networks do not do the minimum they should be doing – verifying sources and crosschecking information. After all, they always attribute reports to Palestinian reporters and always find 'credible' sources that would confirm the charges."

We've seen this here in one of our reputable news outlets where, for 5½ years we had to endure one man's reporting which relied heavily on so-called "credible sources" telling tall tales that often contained obvious flaws that remained unchallenged by the reporter. Despite the failure of our media to cover the French Appeals Court decision, such reporters are now well and truly on notice. As the Jerusalem Post editorial concludes:

"[T]he sordid affair teaches a valuable lesson about the dangerous enthusiasms, especially in Muslim societies, and especially among those who claim to speak for an awakened conscience, for modern myths of Jewish evil."